NetApp Announces OpenStack File Share Service Prototype

NetApp announced it has produced and submitted a prototype and proposal for a file share service to the OpenStack Foundation Technical Committee and community. This announcement from NetApp comes since OpenStack currently doesn’t offer native management support for file-based storage. NetApp intends to add a file share service to incorporate a range of file system types as extensions to the OpenStack block-level storage Cinder project or to implement their service separately in another project. The file share service would terminate the need for users to have a separate management interface to utilize applications designed for file-based storage.

NetApp announced it has produced and submitted a prototype and proposal for a file share service to the OpenStack Foundation Technical Committee and community. This announcement from NetApp comes since OpenStack currently doesn’t offer native management support for file-based storage. NetApp intends to add a file share service to incorporate a range of file system types as extensions to the OpenStack block-level storage Cinder project or to implement their service separately in another project. The file share service would terminate the need for users to have a separate management interface to utilize applications designed for file-based storage.

In addition to code contributions and extended APIs, the NetApp prototype includes a reference and back-end implementation. The prototype was submitted to the OpenStack Cinder Project as NetApp continues to figure out the logistics of the project so that the release will eventually see a high adoption-rate. This NetApp project is designed to work with a broad range of file systems including but not limited to: CIFS, NFS/pNFS, Gluster and Ceph. Supporting a broad range of file systems will simply users’ storage management.

This announcement from NetApp comes on the heels of their OpenStack Foundation status upgrade to Gold Level Member near the end of last year, only a year after initially joining OpenStack. With the new status, NetApp has been participating even more in the OpenStack communicty by adding code and proposals. 

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